Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Last Interview

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Edited by David Streitfeld

An intimate and lively collection of interviews with a giant of twentieth century literature—the only collection of interviews with Marquez available

Hailed by the New York Times as a “conjurer of literary magic,” Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez is known to millions of readers worldwide as the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude. Beloved by readers of nearly all ages, he is perhaps the most popular literary novelist in translation—and he remains so today, a decade after the publication of his final novel.

In addition to the first-ever English translation of Marquez’s last interview, this unprecedented volume includes his first interview, conducted while he was in the throes of writing One Hundred Years of Solitude, which reveals the young writer years before the extraordinary onslaught of success that would make him a household name around the world. Also featured is a series of unusually wide-ranging conversations with Marquez’s friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza—surely the only interview with Marquez that includes the writer’s insights into both the meaning of true love and the validity of superstitions. Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Last Interview also contains two interviews with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter David Streitfeld, who also provides an insightful introduction to the collection.

A wide-ranging and revealing book, Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Last Interview is an essential book for lifelong fans of Marquez—and readers who are just getting encountering the master’s work for the first time.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (b. 1927, Aracataca, Colombia; d. 2014, Mexico City, Mexico) was a Colombian novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. He was one of the most influential and beloved novelists of the twentieth century; his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude has been read by millions worldwide, and is the foremost example of “magical realism.” His other books include the novels The Autumn of the Patriarch, No One Writes to the Colonel, Love in the Time of Cholera, and Memories of My Melancholy Whores, and a memoir, Living to Tell the Tale. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982.

DAVID STREITFELD is the editor of The Last Interview books on Philip K. Dick, J.D. Salinger, and Hunter S. Thompson, all published by Melville House. He is a reporter for The New York Times, where in 2013 he was part of the team awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his family and too many books.

“A conjurer of literary magic . . . A giant of 20th-century literature.”—The New York Times

“The most popular and perhaps best writer in Spanish since Miguel de Cervantes.”—Carlos Fuentes